


The Perfect Gift

by Dogsled



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Christmas Eve, Dean Winchester Loves The Impala, Driving, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Relationship, Impala Makeouts, M/M, Sassy Castiel, Secret Relationship, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 12:42:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17141957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dogsled/pseuds/Dogsled
Summary: A Secret Santa Gift for That Sea Sponge!Cas and Dean are driving down that long and lonely road when the Impala's engine suddenly cuts out. Will they get home in time for Christmas?





	The Perfect Gift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [that_sea_sponge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/that_sea_sponge/gifts).



> A gift for @that-sea-sponge! Happy Secret Santa! I was so pleased to get such a sweet bunch of ideas for what to write, and I hope it makes you very happy! Beta read on a shoestring by the amazing Firefly124. Thank you so much! Wishing you both and everyone else in this year's Destiel Secret Santa a Happy New Year!

Dean didn’t stop for lunch until the sun crept down toward the horizon. Castiel nagged him for the better part of two hundred miles, not that Dean seemed to be in any hurry to listen to his advice. Looking after his own needs was always easier when Sam was around to take care of. It was a fact that Castiel had become acutely aware of ever since becoming Dean’s permanent copilot, that without anyone to insist on Dean eating he was more than likely simply to forget, and keep driving well beyond the normal limits of human endurance.

 

The road took Dean’s mind off his own troubles, and stopping to inhale a taco only broke his focus. So Castiel had to insist.

 

Sympathetically, Cas pecked at the chips on Dean’s plate while he watched the other man eat. While there was no need for him to eat, he’d long since found that there was a necessary social contract to shared eating or drinking, and nutritional requirements weren’t the only purpose of eating. Humans ate for company, they drank for company, and their life experiences forged emotional anchors in the food they were eating at the time. Eating Crunch Cookie Crunch with Jack, for example. Burritos, and the dull ache they left in his belly from the memory of Dean insisting he leave the bunker. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches--his favorite.

 

When they were done eating, they walked cheerfully back to the car together. Dean was humming Night Flight as they climbed back into the Impala, their breath fogging up the glass before they were even settled. While Cas cracked his window, Dean did the same, and the rich growl of the Impala’s engine came just after. They didn’t move until the heater had chased away most of the fog.

 

“Think we’re good?” Dean asked. “Hey, roll your window down then back up.”

 

Cas complied, then settled back, watching as Dean clicked on the headlamps and pulled the nose of the Impala round under the parking lot lights. The road was clear in both directions, and they eased out across the center divide with a happy rattle of the Impala’s V8.

 

The road was distracting, hauntingly beautiful in the dark, and immensely different from how it had been when they’d rolled into town. The wintery brown trees pressed up against the side of the road had been neutral and unthreatening before, but in the Impala’s lights it seemed like gnarled branches reached out toward them out of inky darkness.

 

Dean’s voice startled him from his thoughts: “Grab a tape, huh, Cas?”

 

By “grab a tape”, Cas presumed he was to select one at random, not choose one intentionally. His fingers skidded over several before making his choice, and he fumbled it before sliding it into the tape deck without looking.

 

A moment later they were listening to Clapton, and Dean seemed to visibly relax, settling back into his seat with a soft kind of resolve. Even “Tears in Heaven” didn’t seem to make a dent on his mood, though Castiel found his attention drifting away from Dean once again, peering out the window and thinking about his past, the future, the mournful inevitability of it all.

 

Toward the end of the refrain, just as Clapton sang “I must be strong and carry on” the car faltered and died. The headlights went out, and they sputtered to a dead stop right in the middle of the dark road.

 

“Oh well, that’s just great.”

 

The silent camaraderie they’d developed broke away like a snake shedding its skin. Dean’s words sounded strangely vital and odd in the otherwise dead quiet.

 

“Are we out of fuel?” Castiel asked.

 

“Nah. If it was just that the lights would still be on. The battery must have died somehow. I’ll take a look.”

 

“Not in the middle of the road, surely?”

 

Dean nodded, putting Baby into neutral before glancing up at Cas. “Gonna take both of us to push, okay? I’ll keep one hand on the wheel and we’ll get her over into the gravel.”

 

When Cas was stationed at the back of the car they pushed together, guiding the Impala off to one side of the road, even though a good half of the car still ended up sitting on the asphalt.

 

“Alright, what’s next?” Dean asked, like he was trying to puzzle it out for himself. “Light. Flashlight. We gotta find a flashlight.”

 

The only saving grace to their flashlight quest came from Dean’s meticulously organized trunk. The blades were all neatly wrapped to protect the edge, which saved Dean from accidentally slicing off the tips of his fingers, but soon enough - flashlight in hand - they were popping the hood to poke inside.

 

“Doesn’t seem to be any problem with the connectors. The battery’s new, too, I only put it in last month…”

 

“Then it’s not recharging,” Cas suggested. 

 

“Suggesting there’s something wrong with the alternator,” Dean agreed. “If it were something serious, though, we’d have had more warning, you know? Bad wiring smells...you know? And a dying alternator rattles. Sets your teeth on edge. It doesn’t just go out like that silently halfway down the road. I’d have said it was the belts, but they look fine. We’ll check, though, when she’s cooled down a bit.”

 

“So we just have to wait?”

 

“No point not waiting,” Dean shrugged. “She’s gotta start cold anyway, otherwise we might blow up the catalytic converter.”

 

If Castiel frowned any harder, he felt, his eyes might permanently cross. He barely understood cars at the best of times, and his wealth of knowledge had only been developed when Dean helped him, such as the time when Dean had shown him how to hotwire a car (“so you don’t end up powerless and stuck in the middle of nowhere again”). It had served him very well.

 

“What do we do until then?”

 

Dean flashed Cas a grin as he dropped back into the driver’s seat, gesturing almost with his eyebrows toward the back seat. 

 

Castiel rolled his eyes. “You have a one track mind,” he declared.

 

“Just c’mere, then,” Dean teased, teasing the fingers of one hand around the back of Cas’ neck and tugging him in for a kiss. They bumped noses in the dark, then slid into an eager kiss, arms wrapping awkwardly around in each other. Dean caught Cas’ bottom lip in his teeth, then chuckled around it, tugging and startling a gasp from Castiel. He gave Dean’s shoulder the lightest punch in retribution.

 

“If you keep doing that,” Castiel growled, “I might have to stop kissing you altogether.”

 

“You’d never,” Dean huffed. “You enjoy it far too much.”

 

Cas kissed him again firmly, as though he could silence Dean’s commentary by occupying his mouth with other things. He couldn’t help but dig his teeth into Dean’s plush bottom lip as punishment on the way, only plundering Dean’s mouth with his tongue when he knew he had a clear shot.

 

Chances to make out like this were rare. There was always a threat to their lives going on, and then of course there was Sam and his ever failing lovelife. Both Dean and Castiel had agreed to keep their relationship on the downlow, just so that Sam wasn’t exposed to an excess of PDA. Moments like this, they were scant few and worth treasuring, even if Cas found he had to bat at Dean’s hands to keep them from wandering too intimately into the depths of his trenchcoat.

 

“You’re insatiable,” Cas laughed, prying back Dean’s hands. “Stop that.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Mmm. I don’t want to either. But we should. We have to get the car moving again, yes?”

 

Dean sighed, pressing one last heartfelt kiss against Castiel’s mouth. “Fine. But you owe me.”

 

“I owe you?”

 

“Yeah, you do. Later.”

 

Castiel wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he was more than happy to play along. Owing Dean anything, theoretically speaking, had never come back to bite him on the ass ever before. In fact, he usually sincerely enjoyed it.

 

Reluctantly, Dean climbed back out of the car, and Castiel tagged along, leaning in under the hood to shine the light on the engine block while Dean poked around.

 

“I just don’t know… Ah, hang on, look at this.”

 

“What?”

 

Dean moved over, and Castiel wiggled in closer to peer in. He couldn’t really see that there was anything wrong, no matter how hard he squinted, or how urgently Dean poked  at the cable running between the battery and the alternator.

 

“I’m sorry,” Castiel sighed. “I can’t see it.”

 

“The wire’s just come out, that’s all. I dunno how it got like that, but it makes sense. Like this, the alternator’s not recharging the battery, and we’ve just been running the tape deck and the lights, everything… No wonder she gave up on us.” Dean patted the wing of the car gently. “Did her best.”

 

Castiel was thinking about what could have possibly bumped the wire all the way out of the alternator. He had an idea, but Sam had outright lied to Dean about the dents to Baby’s bumper, and telling Dean about the vampires that Sam had bounced the Impala over seemed like ill advised betrayal. 

 

“So what now?” he asked, instead.

 

“Now we gotta get her running again. The battery will take charge, we just have to get the wheels rolling.”

 

Cas still felt uncertain. He didn’t understand.

 

“We push.”

 

That made sense, and still somehow seemed like a daunting task. Castiel leaned away from the Impala, frowning at it. The whole thing weighed 3500lbs, not including the kit that Dean had added, the fuel load, and the clothes and weapons in the trunk. With everything included, she likely weighed closer to two tons. With his powers no longer on the more divine side of superhuman, even on wheels it seemed like it would take a considerable effort. 

 

Funny. There was a time when he could simply have given the Impala a nice hard shove and she would have gone into orbit. Not that Dean would have been particularly happy with him if he had… 

 

“It’ll be fine,” Dean sighed, seemingly able to tell how unsure Cas was. “We just keep her straight, hit about running speed and pop the clutch. She’ll start up nice and easy.”

 

“If you say so, Dean.”

 

“Have a little faith, Cas. Besides, all you gotta do is push.”

 

Castiel followed Dean around to the back of the car, staying patient while Dean explained where he should place his hands so as not to damage the body or paintwork.

 

“I think I’ve got it,” Cas nodded.

 

“That’s good. Okay. I’m just gonna hop in when we’ve got some momentum. You ready?”

 

Dean stood at the Impala’s open driver’s side door, put his hands on the inside of the frame and began to push. They shoved off together with all their effort, and slowly, slowly, they began to pick up speed. It surprised Cas how quickly they were able to get the car moving, and then at last Dean performed a flying leap into the driver’s side. Cas kept pushing, and then the car shuddered and jumped underneath his hands before roaring suddenly to life.

 

A moment later Dean was idling in neutral waiting for Cas to get back in, grinning almost ear to ear.

 

“See? We did it.”

 

“ _ She _ did it,” Castiel cooed. 

 

Dean seemed to hesitate, and Cas smiled to himself. There was nothing that Dean liked more than to be told how clever or beautiful his car was. It was like an extension of his ego, and compliments for the Impala landed much better than compliments aimed at Dean himself.

 

“I know what you’re doing,” Dean chuckled. “You think you’re smart, but I know what you’re up to.”

 

“Oh, and what precisely am I up to?” Castiel asked, feigning innocence.

 

“You’re trying to get out of that favor you owe me. Well you can think again, buster. I’m on to you. You can’t compliment your way out of my pants.”

 

“What makes you think I’m not trying to flatter my way into them?” Cas asked. “Sam won’t be expecting us until tomorrow. Just so long as we’re there in time for Christmas…”

 

Dean chuckled. “Are you saying we should stop? Hit a motel? Cas, you  _ dog! _ Now who’s insatiable?” 

 

Castiel shrugged, glancing out the dark window at the passing trees. “I like to think of it as boundlessly affectionate.”

 

“Oh yeah? Then in that case I’ll find somewhere as soon as I’m sure the battery will be able to get us going again. Sound fair?”

 

Castiel hid his smile until, reaching across to pat Dean on the knee, he caught the other man’s eyes. When Dean smiled back, it was radiant; a perfect gift.


End file.
